A breakfast favorite at my house! Reheats well, excellent for Kimkins work lunches and much healthier than their potato relatives!

Makes 8-10

2 zucchini, grated & squeezed dry
1 tsp garlic, minced
4 tablespoons onion, grated
1 green onion, minced
1 egg, well beaten
1/2 tsp each salt & pepper
Splash Tabasco

Mix all ingredients well, let sit for a few minutes for flavors to mingle.

Heat nonstick skillet on medium, spray with Pam (or wipe with olive oil on a napkin). Drop zucchini mixture by large cereal spoonfuls, flatten a bit and cook until set & lightly browned (5-6 minutes), flip and cook 3-4 minutes on reverse.

For breakfast I make large latkes, poke a whole in the middle (donut) and break an egg into the center. Cover, cook 7 minutes on low, serve.

During the summer when my zucchini plants are producing armloads, I make these in large batches in the morning & refrigerate the leftovers. My kids warm them in the microwave and munch on them wrapped in a napkin!

Much better nutrition than Little Debbie's!

I'm always on the warpath for anybody serious about losing weight to avoid Starbucks like the plague.

Even Jay Leno of The Tonight Show chimed in with an all too true joke:

"When will Starbucks customers realize that they're just buying a hot milkshake?"

Want proof? Check out these calorie & carb counts for the 20 ounce size:

• Blended Mocha Frappuccino   301 cal 72 carb
• Tarzo Green Tea Frappuccino 550 cal 76 carb
• Chai Latte, Low Fat Milk      332 cal 46 carb
• Mocha, Whole Milk, No Whip   508 cal 55 carb
• White Chocolate Frappuccino  610 cal 92 carb
  

Even the innocent sounding black tea!Â

• Tarzo Black Iced Tea                 80 cal 21 carbÂ

No matter what diet you follow, do yourself a favor and bypass that morning latte!

A quick thought for anyone who drinks alcohol.

As delicious as a mai tai is on a hot summer day, rum, vodka or any distilled alcohol is technically a poison. During times of war, it's even used an emergency sterilizer for surgical tools!

A dangerous byproduct of alcohol metabolism is acetaldehyde. If there's too much acetaldehyde in your blood stream you die -- more commonly known as alcohol poisoning.

What does this mean to a dieter? Each alcoholic drink causes some damage to the liver. Fortunately, the liver can withstand a fair amount of abuse before it shuts down it's wondrous array of metabolic functions. But years of enjoying alcohol (or being obese) can result in a medical condition known as fatty liver. What this means is that the liver literally becomes congested with fat globules and can't do its job.

Your cholesterol levels will be very high because the liver can't metabolize fat.

What does the liver do? It has many functions including filtering everything we eat, drink or breathe. For a dieter, it's the furnace of the body. As body fat is burned, it's metabolized by the liver and expelled. However, for a liver congested with fat there's no room so to speak for the liver to do this vital work. It's pretty much as fruitless as trying to race your car to work while stuck in a traffic jam. Nothing's happening.

If you lose weight more slowly than you think you should and you've been a fan of alcohol for a number of years, you owe your liver a favor. Ask your doctor for liver function blood tests. Discuss the results and your alcohol consumption with him. Promise yourself to start a new path to health including losing extra body fat.

Your liver is your friend. Give it a break.

Counting, counting -- calories, carbs, fat grams. What a bother!

But there's nothing better to make sure you're truly on track with which ever diet you're following. Of course, if that happens to be Kimkins that cuts it your work down to checking carbs with a sly glance toward calories.

There's a gaggle of food diary sites on the web, but my favorite happens to be Fitday

A free tool, it tracks a very wide variety of whole and prepared foods listing all the basic nutritional info, plus a report on where you stack up percentage wise for nutrition goals.

Have to admit, my obsessive-compulsive self loves the calorie breakdown pie chart graph the best!

Users will appreciate the basic food journal where you can jot your menus, exercise or anything else you care to remember about a particular day. A handy weight graph (love it at a steep decline!) is a visual reminder of your progress.

Care to share your choices? An easy "public" link option makes viewing by the public easy as 1-2-3.

BTW, Fitday exported most (all?) of its data from the USDA Nutrient Data Database. My sources reveal that this was done painstakingly by hand, so there are a few errors. If anything doesn't look right, you can always check it through the USDA site.